Quotes from Mike McCready

Life is a pre-existing condition.

I am constantly amazed at their support over the years.

There's a Kiss through-line to a lot of the music that came out of Seattle, and it hasn't been talked about a lot.

Other bands gave us lip service, but when it came down to it they kind of backed off. That was a little disheartening. But I respect them. That's their business.

I love some kind of pressure in the air. Some kind of weirdness in the crowd, good or bad. That's what we thrive on.

Sometimes with Polaroids, the shot you want to get in your head doesn't happen. What it makes me do is be patient, I guess, or let go of that presumption of what the shot's going to be.

Duff McKagen's been a dear friend of mind for a long time, and he's a Seattlelite.

I have lived most my life with chronic inflammation and constant pain with immediate diarrhea.

My life would have been different without Paul Stanley or Ace Frehley. They would have to be the greatest on my list as an influence to my life at 11 years old.

In the early days of Pearl Jam, we were caught up in such a whirlwind that I was just trying to keep my head on straight and play music. I didn't have the kind of confidence that other guys in the band did.

Mad Season changed my life in a million different ways.

I have had Crohn's for about 19 years. It is a debilitating disease that affects my colon.

I like 'X-Files'-type shows with government conspiracies and extraterrestrials and all that.

I hope we've lightened up over the years. We're fairly comfortable where we are, living-wise, and we're excited, honestly, just to still be around. I think we're less earnest than we were.

I don't ever want to play a festival again, period.

The average life spans of many bands are not that long, up to five years if they are lucky.

We try to keep everything as in-house and small and as punk rock and do-it-yourself as we can. That's part of our way of doing business.

And watching Ed, he's really coming into his own doing some new things onstage I've never seen him do. He's really getting into it, putting 120 percent into the show. We feel comfortable and excited.

I think about trying to make it better. That's all I do when we play 'Even Flow' or anything off of 'Ten': 'Let's do this the best we can.'

I hold Mad Season very fondly to my heart, and there's a lot of sadness in that, too.

It's always cool when somebody from a football team or baseball team comes to your show.

To be able to make a living doing what I love is truly a gift, and I'm thankful for that every day.

It was by design that we mostly used pictures that you could not necessarily see what was going on, and that didn't really focus in on the band, but instead focused in on a theme.

Reason why we've lasted so long is we write music; we get very intense. We go away from each other, do our own thing, and then we get back together.